Review: Allen Toussaint’s Last Album, ‘American Tunes’

Allen Toussaint

“American Tunes”

(Nonesuch)

Allen Toussaint sings just once on his final album, “American Tunes,” but it’s a moment worth savoring. The song is Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” a secular hymn of perseverance, and he starts out solemn, backed only by an acoustic guitar. He waits a full two minutes before tolling a chord at the piano, as punctuation for the first line of the bridge: “And I dreamed I was dying.” He plays it on the offbeat, naturally.

Mr. Toussaint, who died last year at 77 after performing a concert in Madrid, was a soft-spoken yet statesmanlike eminence of New Orleans music: a pianist, singer-songwriter, producer and arranger whose influence ran deep through soul and rhythm and blues.

Image

He also loved jazz, and made a recent album loosely in that lineage — “The Bright Mississippi” on Nonesuch in 2009 — with the producer Joe Henry. “American Tunes” is a follow-up of sorts, in that it was also produced by Mr. Henry, with choice collaborators, including the tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd and the guitarist Bill Frisell, who help serve up a courtly version of the Billy Strayhorn ballad “Lotus Blossom.” They also join Rhiannon Giddens on a pair of vocal pieces by Duke Ellington: “Come Sunday,” imploring and formal, and “Rocks in My Bed,” stomping and sly.

But even with these reference points, the album’s jazz affinities feel less meaningful than its resonances with New Orleans. Several tracks feature Mr. Toussaint alone at the piano, and they’re reminders of the regional traditions he elegantly upheld.

In particular they recall the New Orleans piano legend Professor Longhair; Mr. Toussaint had a formative and special admiration for him, like Matisse’s relationship to Cézanne. Two of the solo pieces, “Hey Little Girl” and “Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” are Professor Longhair tunes; a third, “Big Chief,” was one of his calling cards, written by Earl King. The dignified calm with which Mr. Toussaint plays these rollicking tunes almost suggests a sleight-of-hand: he’s not showing you how much work it takes to make this music sound so effortless.

Smooth elegance is more his style, as he demonstrates on a pair of tracks featuring Van Dyke Parks on a second piano: “Danza, Op. 33,” by the Creole composer Louis Gottschalk, and “Southern Nights,” which Mr. Toussaint wrote in a pastoral frame of mind. As for the valedictory title track by Mr. Simon, another longtime friend and collaborator, Mr. Toussaint takes care to keep it buoyant. “Oh, but it’s all right,” he sings persuasively. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”